Never have dull. boring and bland been such selling points in the tourism business.

I read this morning that there’s a town in New South Wales, Australia, called Bland Shire. Aussies being Aussies, they’ve decided to take advantage of their Plain Jane status by forging a relationship with Dull, Scotland, which already has a sister relationship with, wait for it, Boring, Oregon.

Bland. Dull. And Boring. Whoever thought a three-way could be so uninteresting?

A story from UPI says residents of Australia’s Bland Shire region just the other day made a visit to Dull, Scotland, “to forge ties between the two uninterestingly named locations.”

Dot McCaskie and Gail Platz, residents of the New South Wales region of Bland Shire, were greeted in Dull last week by Julie and Donald Riddell, The Daily Telegraph in Britain reported.

I read the piece but was thirsting for details. I mean, when Bland and Dull get together what’s on the dinner menu? Grey, boiled beef with soggy, white cauliflower? Do they pair that with Coors Light, the oxymoron of all beer labels? Did they stay in a Holiday Inn and watch Adam Sandler movies and eat plain chips (sorry, crisps) with glasses of tap water?

The world may never know.

According to the Telegraph, the Bland trip “was inspired by Dull’s partnership with Boring, which is aimed at creating an official ‘Boring and Dull Day’ to celebrate the two locations and the mundane activities their names imply.”

An employee of the Bland Shire Council said she hopes the visit “will basically make people aware of Bland Shire, and also make people aware there are unusual names around the world.”

Indeed there are. I read the other day that, although it sounds interesting or exotic to North Americans, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia actually means “Muddy Confluence.”

There’s a town in Vermont called Dummerston and, here in Ontario, you’ll find a close cousin in the town of Drumbo, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

There are, of course, lots of sex-inflected place names around the globe. I wrote not long ago about a place in England called Hornyold Road and mentioned other British place names such as Cockermouth. I’d forgotten but there’s also a Fu—ing in Austria. And don’t forget Dildo, Newfoundland, Climax, Saskatchewan, Butts, Georgia, New Erection, Virginia and Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

There’s even a Mississippi town called Threeway, which is probably not Dull or Boring. Or Bland.

You can reach Travel Editor Jim Byers at jbyers@thestar.ca . You also can follow him on Twitter @jimbyerstravel.

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